Jaqueline Hoang Nguyen, Brian Jungen & Duane Linklater, and Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens at Vox

I headed down to the 2-22 Building on St. Catherine Street last week to see what it has on offer for fall. Vox Centre de l’image contemporain has three exhibitions on view: Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater’s film Modest Livelihood, Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen’s NFB film programme Challenge for Change, and Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens’ installation The Golden USB. Several links can be found between these three exhibitions: ideas of documentation, agency, communication, and the forging of new relationships are all explored. Together they form a complex, layered, and complimentary triad.



Brian Jungen & Duane Linklater, Modest Livelihood

Nguyen’s Challenge for Change is a selection of films drawn from an NFB series of the same name, produced in the 60s and 70s that documented pressing issues in Canadian society in collaboration with their subjects. At the time of their making the hope was that these films would generate social and political change.

Jungen and Linkleter’s Modest Livelihood ties most directly to Challenge for Change. It is a striking silent film inspired by the aesthetic tradition of golden age NFB documentaries. The work documents two hunting trips taken by the artists. Like the anthropological NFB films of yore, it documents a traditional First Nation practice, but by removing the sound, a layer of privacy is added. Oral information passed down from an Elder (Jungen’s uncle) is not available to the audience, nor is any conversation between the two friends. Instead, visual spectacle becomes primary – the physical relationship between the hunters, the land, and the animal.

The Golden USB also documents the contemporary world but its scope is both broader and yet absurdly minute, its alleged raison d’être being the search for new relationships through interstellar trade. The exhibition references a digital compendium of everything on earth that might be economically interesting to extra-terrestrial life forms, from elements of nature, to cultural and industrial products. The “samples” are stored in a golden USB and documented through video, voice recording, charts, and actual “specimens”, all of which are on display. The work critiques contemporary consumerist culture and global – or in this case, galactic – capitalism.

Also always worth checking out at the 2-22 is Artexte’s exhibition space. At the moment it features two conceptually compelling bodies of work by the American artist Jason Simon.


Vox: http://www.centrevox.ca/en/
Challenge for Change & Modest Livelihood continue until November 1.
The Golden USB continues until November 8.


Susannah Wesley is an artist and curator living in Montreal. She has been a member of the collaborative duo Leisure since 2004 and from 1997-2000 was part of the notorious British art collective the Leeds13. Formerly Director at Battat Contemporary in Montreal, she holds an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art and an MA in Art History from Concordia University. She is Akimblog's Montreal correspondent and can be followed @susannahwesley1 on Twitter.